Family Failures

For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.  Psalm 27:10  NASB

Will take me up – One of the greatest tragedies of life is to be forsaken by your parents.  Not orphaned but abandoned.  Recovery from that circumstance is extremely difficult, if even possible.  Parental abandonment is life threatening, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually.  A child’s basic identity is destroyed.  The answer to the question, “Who am I?” becomes staring into a deep, dark, silent pit.  All I know is that I am alone—utterly, completely alone.  No one cares about me.

Except—and it is the lifesaving “except”—God cares.

“Robert Alter will say of this verse that it is ‘perhaps the most extreme declaration of trust in the whole Bible.’ . . Remarkably, this line is often omitted from translations of this psalm in prayerbooks.  I guess I am not the only one who has found the verse troubling.”[1]

Why should it be left out of Jewish prayerbooks?  Perhaps because the implication that a mother and a father could actually forsake a child is just too painful to even imagine, especially in the Jewish community.  Perhaps it’s better not to even think about such a thing, to pretend it could never happen.  But if we turn a blind eye to this reality, then we also miss the incredible declaration of God’s care and compassion.  If we pretend that parents could never really do such a thing, then we can’t experience the ontological foundation of our very existence—God cares!

The reality of this world, the world outside the walls of the synagogue, is that biological parents do abandon their children.  It has happened over and over throughout human history.  Psychological orphans are real.  And God is perhaps the only true answer.  The Hebrew text uses the verb ʿāzab.  Here it’s in the qatal—a completed action.  Not temporary neglect.  No, this is desolation.  But the verb is also used of God.  “God can also be the subject of this verb with man as the object. The promise is that God will never forsake the righteous by allowing him to fall into the hands of the wicked.”^[2]  It’s critically important to recognize that there is a second root of this verb, spelled exactly the same way, used once in Nehemiah 3:8.  There it means “restore.”  What is forsaken can be restored, but it will take divine action to accomplish.  Chabad translates this verse as:

For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord gathers me in.

כִּֽי־אָבִ֣י וְאִמִּ֣י עֲזָב֑וּנִי וַֽ֜יהֹוָה יַֽאַסְפֵֽנִי

“Gathers me in” is from the Hebrew verb ʾāsap.  “Transitively, the verb under consideration denotes ‘to bring together,’ ‘collect’; intransitively, ‘to come together,’ ‘assemble.’”^[3]  Perhaps the NASB translators wished to capture the idea of lifted up as a psychological theme, but the verb suggests something more.  It suggests being collected into a community. Restoration of parental abandonment means more than God as substitute father.  It means being ushered into someplace I belong, some people who are my family.  God is our Father, and the plural is very important.  The extreme declaration of trust isn’t individual.  It’s communal.  It’s us, we, our—and I will need all of that if I’m going to recover.

Topical Index: forsaken, ʿāzab, ʾāsap, come together, Psalm 27:10

[1] Jack Riemer, in Jack Riemer and Elie Spitz, Duets on Psalms: Drawing New Meaning from Ancient Words (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023), p. 97.

^[2] Schultz, C. (1999). 1594 עָזַב. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 659). Chicago: Moody Press.

^[3] Feinberg, C. L. (1999). 140 אָסַף. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 60). Chicago: Moody Press.